High Fidelity Mobile Gaming Is on the Rise, Putting Pressure on GPUs

The global games market will reach $109 billion this year according to our Global Games Market Report, and mobile gaming is the largest segment with revenues of $46.1 billion. From a hardware perspective, mobile games can be categorized as those that make good use of a device’s GPU and those that do not, or 3D games and 2D games, respectively. In recent years, a new category has emerged that is pushing the GPU of mobile devices to the limit. These graphically intensive, or high fidelity, games are allowing for console-like experiences on mobile. Genres that typically fall into this category are first-person shooters, racing games, multiplayer online battle arenas (MOBAs), and all types of massively multiplayer online (MMO) games.

To classify as high fidelity, a game needs to have advanced 3D graphics with high vertex counts, complex vertex and fragment shaders, sophisticated gameplay possibly including AI-controlled characters, and sustained high levels of GPU demand.

Together with ARM, we recently created a report exploring the growing popularity of these high fidelity games. You can download this report here.

China leads in terms of revenues from high fidelity games

In the West, high fidelity games accounted for between 5% and 10% of the top grossing mobile games in 2016. They are also growing faster than the total mobile market. In North America, 45 of the top 200 Android games were high fidelity, including Madden NFL, CSR Racing 2, and World of Tanks Blitz. In Europe, this number was 60 and includes games like Real Racing 3 and Need for Speed No Limits. However, the real high fidelity fans are in China, where 134 of the top 200 games can be considered high fidelity. In 2016, high fidelity games accounted for 40% of the revenues generated by the top 200 grossing games.

Learn more about how to succeed as a high end, high fidelity game by choosing the right GPU in this blog post from ARM.

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